


wilderness of comfort

by facingthenorthwind (spacegandalf)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone is Jewish, First War with Voldemort, Gen, Jewish Remus Lupin, Vidui, Yom Kippur | Atonement Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-18 23:20:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20647370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacegandalf/pseuds/facingthenorthwind
Summary: The Order on Yom Kippur.





	wilderness of comfort

**Author's Note:**

> It's that time of year again, Jewish Fic Time. It's astounding that this is the first everyone is jewish fic I've written, lbr. Thank you to Kayla and Zoe for the encouragement and validation. <3
> 
> Yes they shouldn't put their tallitot on before Kol Nidrei, I realised after I wrote it but couldn't work out a way to make it sounds as good. Artistic Licence, etc. etc.

On Yom Kippur morning everyone gathered at headquarters (Moody’s cramped two-up two-down, files and books stacked to the ceiling in every room) in relative silence, the greetings having all been used up the night before. On the way over Remus had felt jumpy and exposed in his white robes, his white runners already muddy from the short walk from the nearest Apparition point. It was silly, of course — everyone was in white, mostly, but the streets were oddly silent with the lack of cars. Just people walking along the footpath, looking like ghosts as they made their way to synagogue. 

Remus thought of his parents at the little synagogue in Aberystwyth and his heart ached. He could have gone home, but the Order always had their own Yom Kippur services, led by Moody in his gruff but practised Hebrew. Remus wasn’t sure how it began — it had never felt quite right to ask — but he guessed it was Moody’s paranoia. Well, paranoia made it sound uncalled for — his constant vigilance, then. There had been more than one Yom Kippur attack by Death Eaters in the past. 

If Remus had asked, Moody would probably have let him go back to Aberystwyth, but making minyan was never certain, and Remus would never want them all to be caught short. It wasn’t exactly like they could ask on the street for a tenth person, after all. 

So instead of having the comfort of his family around him Remus had this ragtag almost-family instead. Last night, they had been supposed to start at six but ten past came and went and there were still only nine of them: Moody, Remus, Sirius, Peter, Emmeline, Arabella, Elphias, Dedalus and Sturgis. Lily, James, Frank and Alice were all in hiding, Dumbledore was off doing who knew what and everyone else was dead.

_Everyone._

Last year they’d made minyan easily, even without the Potters and the Longbottoms — the McKinnons and the Boneses, the Prewett brothers, Caradoc, Dorcas. 1981 had been cruel, and Remus did not come ready, last night or this morning, to forgive God for it. Instead he carried a lump in the pit of his stomach something like anger — but it was like getting wet wood to burn: the exhaustion he constantly felt stifled the flames and it never quite caught. 

They had waited because there was still a chance — a small one — that perhaps Mundungus or Dumbledore would turn up at the last moment.

Nobody did.

At last, Moody had said, “We should get started,” and they each put on their tallit, the weight of it on Remus’s shoulders somewhere between suffocation and comfort.

It wasn’t part of the traditional liturgy but Moody began by lighting a candle for each person they’d lost in the last year. They perhaps should have had everyone they’d lost, but that would be far too many candles, and Remus suspected there was a limit to how much you could make a house fireproof with magic. As he lit each one, he said the name of the person who’d been taken — ripped away from them. And this, Remus knew this wasn’t God’s fault (for once) — except maybe it was, because God gave the Death Eaters free will, so — so he wasn’t sure where he could usefully put the blame. It was all useless and stupid and everyone had died such _senseless_ deaths. Part of him had wanted to take off his tallit and go smear mud on it from the rain that had just begun to fall, to leave and not come back — what kind of a God was this, to demand his prayers after the year that had been? What was the point of coming together in this tiny room, to say prayers with seething resentment for the One they were directed at?

But Remus hadn’t moved, because ultimately, this wasn’t about God and he wanted God to know that. This was about community, about family, about the way the words and the melodies gave them all something to cling to in the middle of this impossible, terrible war. The main parts of the liturgy that they would be unable to do were the praise of God — the Thirteen Divine Attributes of Mercy and kaddish. _Sustain us, for who else will sanctify your name?_

Last night, they had annulled vows that they couldn’t fulfill, and Remus thought of the way he had promised Lily he would make his mother’s vanilla slice, only for them to go into hiding before he could. He thought of the way that Caradoc had died with Remus owing him a butterbeer and three galleons. He thought of the easy ways they had made pledges and agreements and how once, even at his lowest, he had always seen a future with the three people he was closest to in the entire world. 

The war had taken all of that now. James was in hiding and Peter and Sirius had drifted away, what Remus once thought were unbreakable bonds made brittle by the constant fog of suspicion which ate away at their relationships like rust.

This morning they had other prayers: Remus prayed the morning service on auto-pilot, the familiar shapes of the words in his mouth a feeble comfort. They were still one short of a minyan, but hadn’t bothered to wait this morning — what was the point? He was almost overcome by the vision of a future where more and more people died until it was just Remus left, somehow still in Moody’s house, praying Ne’ilah alone and surrounded by guttering candles.

He made it all the way to Unetaneh Tokef before he began crying. _On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed — how many shall pass away and how many shall be born, who shall live and who shall die._

As they recited the many methods of death — fire, water, sword, beast, earthquake, plague — he thought of all the times he’d come across corpses unmarred by anything but horribly, unnaturally still, bathed in the terrible green of the Dark Mark. By the twin babies they’d found still wrapped in their blankets in the Bones household; by Marlene collapsed on the stairs, her wand at her side.

If they had recited the deaths of their own in the same way, it would just be one word, again and again: retzach, retzach, retzach. Murder.

_Man’s essence is dust and dust is his end._

Remus wasn’t the only one crying. Moody was still leading the service in strong, clear Hebrew, but when Remus looked he could see most of the others had tears trickling down their faces. Sirius was clearly trying to hide his periodic sobs. 

The rest of the Amidah followed before the part Remus had been dreading: the recitation of sins, each accompanied by his closed fist on his chest. _We are not so arrogant and stiff-necked as to say before You, Lord our God and God of all ages, we are perfect and have not sinned; rather do we confess: we have gone astray, we have sinned, we have transgressed._

Ashamnu, we have been guilty. Bagadnu, we have betrayed. Remus looked around surreptitiously as he struck his chest, wondering who it was who had betrayed — there was no other reason why so many people had died this year. Someone in the Order had been treacherous, selling information and lives for who knew what. Sirius was the most likely culprit, but it didn’t sit quite right with him — why would Sirius go back to the family he had been cast out from? But again, a small voice in the back of his head: who else could it be? Who in this room had the gall to murder people and then pray next to them?

He stood shoulder to shoulder with a murderer and begged God for forgiveness — they were but a remnant, a shadow of what they had been before the war, and Remus prayed less for God to forgive him than to find the strength to forgive God. There was a poem in his machzor, one of the few things in English, and he focused on that instead of the Hebrew: _And to what purpose, as the darkness closes about, / And the child screams in the jellied fire, / Had best be our present concern, / Here, in this wilderness of comfort / In which we dwell._

He prayed and he wept and somewhere, a Dark Mark bloomed in the sky like blood from a wound.

**Author's Note:**

> The title and the poem quoted from at the end is [Words for the Day of Atonement](https://books.google.com.au/books?id=cMcXRdjN4NgC&pg=PT72&dq=%22words+for+the+day+of+atonement%22+anthony+hecht&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiM1pCOnNLkAhXI_XMBHUB8AR8Q6AEIODAC#v=onepage&q=%22words%20for%20the%20day%20of%20atonement%22%20anthony%20hecht&f=false) by Anthony Hecht. All the other italics are translated prayers.
> 
> For the curious:  
**Yom Kippur**: the holiest day of the Jewish Year, where you atone for your sins and God decides who's going to die in the coming year. As with all Jewish holidays, it starts in the evening.  
**Minyan**: a prayer quorum of 10 people, required to say certain prayers.  
**Ne'ilah**: the closing Yom Kippur service.  
**Unetaneh Tokef**: [an extremely metal prayer](https://www.sefaria.org/Unetaneh_Tokef.1?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en) which is a list of Ways to Die.  
**Amidah**: the main part of the Jewish prayer service.


End file.
